Darkside EP

Nicolas Jaar's tight, three-song EP as Darkside, a collaboration with guitarist and bassist Dave Harrington, is at once sexy and frigid, cavernous and cramped.

Nicolas Jaar creates slow, strange, cloistered songs with keyboards and field recordings, breath, and drums. He makes synthesizers feel like natural elements, mingled with running waters, murmuring voices, and sighing winds. Jaar called his breakthrough record Space Is Only Noise, expanded on a key track to "Space Is Only Noise if You Can See". Titles are often red herrings, but this is the rare case where we might pause and come to understand something essential about Jaar's perspective. No one has found a good box for him yet, likely because he doesn't make a kind of music, but a way of music. (In purely diagnostic terms, our own Mike Powell's "downtempo minimalism" is the best shorthand I've read, though it wisely doesn't even venture to address the music's sense.) Jaar's new EP as Darkside, a collaboration with guitarist and bassist Dave Harrington, clarifies things further, but we've got to unpack a little before we come to it.

Listen again: Space is only noise if you can see. The nouns and verbs are flashier, but the devil's in the adverbs and conjunctions. I kind of hate that rogue "only," that innocent-faced little "if." Does it mean that if you can see, you discover space is merely noise? Or that space becomes noise only upon being seen? And what the hell would either of those things mean? Jaar doesn't make it that easy for us. His assertive yet ambiguous phrasing has no solvable outcome, so it sticks in your mind-- or rather, your mind sticks up against it. And this may be the key to how Jaar's music works too. He applies a chilly, commanding logic to disassociated quantities until they fall into a restive equilibrium. He creates biospheres and then adds one extra, destabilizing element, or leaves out something crucial. His songs pose enigmatic questions disguised as bold assertions. Meaning leaks out of the substance to pool in the cracks, and things that shouldn't relate, do.

That Jaar is more about means than ends explains why he's able to transition so seamlessly from dreamy electronic music inflected with impressionist piano, gently digitized French singing, lobby-jazz, and cave sounds to the terse, rugged dub-funk of Darkside, all while still sounding totally Jaar: nocturnal, cerebral, sensuous, paradoxical, and intuitive. (And sounding totally Jaar is a remarkable thing for a young producer with one major album under his belt to be able to do in any case.) The tight, three-song EP, released on Jaar's own Clown and Sunset label, is at once sexy and frigid, cavernous and cramped. Much closer to idiomatic pop than Space, with Harrington's falsetto clenching Jaar's own loose, Matthew Dear-like croak, the EP brings Jaar's highly personalized values to the quality of time, rather than space: because what is funk, if not the creative, slantwise division of metrical time? As Harrington holds down long, deep, calmly needling grooves, Jaar colors the atmosphere around them to give them different senses of brave momentum or back-winding reticence, earthbound heft or atmospheric suspension. On "A1", he sets glimmering whorls below the loping guitar and a cushion of static above, holding them in check until the very end, when they burst forth in a high-desert mirage that carries over into the Morricone-tipping "A2". It's icy-hot stuff. The importance of Harrington's ace fretwork can't be overstated, but the frosty austerity could only be a product of the curious mind of Jaar.